The War of Wars (93 page)

It had been the last great naval battle of the Napoleonic wars, a victory won largely by a single captain in a single ship, on a par with the Glorious First of June, St Vincent, Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. Although fewer ships were destroyed, thanks to Gambier’s ineptitude, Aix had momentous effects; for the French never stirred out of port in force again, nor threatened Britain seriously with invasion. There were to be no more great sea battles.

Cochrane however was far too junior and controversial to enjoy the thanks of the Admiralty or the government. On the return of the British fleet to Britain, it was Gambier who was granted the honours of victory. When Cochrane protested publicly, a court-martial was held which was a travesty of justice. When Gambier was commended, Cochrane was considered disgraced. He furiously turned down an offer to command a flotilla in the Mediterranean.

Britain’s greatest living seaman was eventually offered in 1814 command of a ship of the line. Before he could sail, however, he was implicated, almost certainly falsely, in a spectacular stock exchange fraud and was sent to prison for a year. The career of the
loup de mer
, as Napoleon had admiringly dubbed him, was later rescued when he was given command of the fleets that helped to liberate Chile and Peru from Spanish rule and Brazil from Portugal, as well as, less successfully, of the fleet in the Greek war of liberation. It was a fitting end to a career even more eccentric, topsy-turvy and in some ways brave and dashing than those of Nelson and Wellington.

The destruction of the French fleet at Aix Roads reaffirmed Britain’s complete naval superiority. It occurred just as Wellesley was making his stormy way across the Bay of Biscay with his new expeditionary force. The victory could hardly have been better timed. Napoleon now had a great deal more on his plate than the ‘side-show’ in the Peninsula. The fragile peace on his eastern borders had collapsed, and something approaching a conspiracy to overthrow him was taking place in the salons of Paris.

When he had turned back to Paris from Valladolid, he had done so because he had learned of an extraordinary reception given by Talleyrand to which Joseph Fouché, the all-powerful minister of police had been invited. The two men had long detested each other. When they were seen in earnest conversation while their master was away in Spain, it seemed a direct challenge.

There were also rumours of a plot to put Joachim Murat in power. Talleyrand was certainly aware of this. Further, Talleyrand appeared to be conspiring with Metternich, the brilliant young Austrian ambassador in Paris, who was openly pressing his masters in Vienna to renew war against France. Metternich reported back home that Murat and Talleyrand were working for a general peace in Europe, although not the overthrow of Napoleon. Instead they sought to tie his hands with a dynastic marriage – and Talleyrand, as much as Metternich, favoured an Austrian royal wife. First, though, in Metternich’s view, it was necessary for Austria to administer a severe military drubbing to Napoleon.

This episode is highly revealing. It shows the extent to which the boastful, all-powerful Emperor in fact survived on the sufferance of two powerful constituencies; the marshals around him, whom he could berate and order in battle and the powerful political constituencies represented by men like Talleyrand and Fouché who could conspire with senior officers if they believed Napoleon was damaging France. The generals as a whole had the power to depose Napoleon because they collectively could muster greater military force than he could (which explains his continuing inability to dismiss these senior soldiers except in cases of military failure). This showed how weak the Emperor immediately became if he was exposed to unexpected military setbacks of the kind occurring in Spain. He had miscalculated disastrously over Spain, and there were mutterings against him in dark corners. He could rant and rage at these conspirators but he was powerless even to arrest them, much as he would have liked to. All he could do was travel posthaste to Paris to reassert his authority.

The mystery remains why Talleyrand chose so publicly to signal his discontent with the Emperor by openly fraternizing with Fouché. It may be that he wanted to signal that he was not engaged in any underhand plotting, but was quite open and candid about his opposition. It may simply have been because Talleyrand believed Fouché had learnt of the plot and thought it best to implicate the powerful police chief before he was able to report to the Emperor. Perhaps he merely thought so public a display would force the Emperor to undercut him by following the exact course he recommended – the Austrian marriage, which was in fact what occurred. In the case of a mind as devious as Talleyrand’s, there was certainly a motive.

Napoleon’s reaction on learning of this cabal was instantaneous. Arriving in Paris, he summoned a meeting of the privy council after first scolding Fouché in private. Then, in front of the senior members of his government, he told them that to doubt the Emperor was the beginning of treason, to criticize him treason itself. He turned on Talleyrand and shouted himself hoarse with personal abuse, including references to his lameness and the infidelity of his wife. ‘You are a thief, a coward, a man without honour, you disbelieve in God, you have betrayed everyone, to you nothing is sacred, you would sell your own
father! You suppose, without rhyme or reason, that my Spanish affairs are going wrong. You deserve that I should smash you like a glass, but I despise you too profoundly to put myself to that trouble!’

He finished by describing him as excrement in a silk stocking. Then he stormed off. Talleyrand merely remarked, ‘What a pity that so great a man should be so ill-bred.’ But Napoleon did not arrest him. He finally condescended to speak to Talleyrand three days later. The biggest source of his fury was probably the awareness that Talleyrand had urged the Austrians to wage war against France – which was by any standards high treason. On the following day Napoleon buttonholed the scheming Metternich. ‘Well! This is something new at Vienna! What does it mean? Has a spider stung you? Who is threatening you? Whom are you aiming at? Do you want to set the world aflame again?’

He remarked to a companion: ‘Metternich has almost become a statesman, he lies very well. [Austria] wants to get slapped; she shall have it, on both cheeks. If the Emperor Francis attempts any hostile move, he will soon have ceased to reign. That is clear. Before another ten years mine will be the most ancient dynasty of Europe.’

This time, for once, Napoleon could not be blamed for starting the war. It was declared upon him unilaterally by Austria. It marked a huge turnabout in his fortunes. For until that moment the Emperor had held the initiative in Europe. He was the man who had threatened Britain with invasion in 1805, who had declared himself Emperor and then behaved so provocatively in Italy and Germany that the reluctant Austrians had no choice but to declare war upon him in the year that culminated at Austerlitz. It was he who had goaded the Prussians the following year, leading to their declaration of war and the hammer-blows struck against them and the Russians by the French. He had set the agenda, the others had merely reacted.

When his juggernaut rolled into Spain, supposedly to punish Godoy’s disloyalty but, in practice to acquire another huge province for his empire, once again he was the aggressor, but also unquestionably the moving spirit in Europe. With the setbacks in Spain, however, with his army for the first time bogged down in a war of uncertain duration, and even occasionally being defeated, he had lost the initiative for the first time.

The Austrians, still his most formidable land enemy, were quick to seize it from his grasp. In this they could be labelled the aggressors. But it was primarily Napoleon’s fault. Talleyrand had been right in remarking that all his victories would count for nothing unless they were used as the foundation for a new settlement of Europe – French-led no doubt, but broadly acceptable to the others. It had been useless to force a punitive peace on Austria and then to dismember Prussia because sooner or later those formidable states would fight to recover their lost territory.

If Napoleon had been generous in victory, established his succession and a dynastic alliance with Austria as Talleyrand had long urged, with Austrian self-respect guaranteed and a compromise on the Italian territories, and if he had treated Prussia with generosity, then perhaps a peaceful and lasting settlement in the east could have been achieved. France might then have controlled all of the territory west of the Rhine, with a group of German buffer states and Austria and Prussia acting as a shield against unpredictable Russia with its barbarian and expansionist tendencies. Neither Austria nor Prussia harboured any expansionist designs towards France. But Napoleon had humiliated both, as well as the German states which now watched like hawks for the chance to restore their fortunes.

Worse, he had ill-advisedly sought out Russia as his ally. Not only were the Russians unreliable and sought a deal with France solely to carve up smaller countries like Poland and Finland between them: the alliance was between Europe’s two most aggressive and predatory countries. The Austrians and Prussians feared, with justice, that it would be at the expense of more settled countries like their own. A strong party at the Russian court also favoured an alliance with Russia’s traditional ally, Britain, France’s mortal enemy.

Instead of being seduced by the roguish Alexander, whose charms were subject to snake-like transformations into enmity, Napoleon would have been much wiser to make friends with the muddle-headed Frederick William of Prussia and the worthy, pedantic Emperor Francis of Austria. By failing to resolve his eastern frontier Napoleon made himself susceptible to further attack at any time.

By suddenly choosing to overthrow the decadent Bourbons of
Spain, he did something even worse. He reminded his royal antagonists that he was at heart an upstart and a revolutionary, a lower-born commander accustomed to overthrowing the established order and replacing them with his puppets in alliance with the anti-feudal minor nobility and urban bourgeoisie of Europe. He could hardly pose as the creator of a new, stable royal dynasty equal to the great dynasties of Europe (and look to marry into them) as he sought to overthrow one of the most ancient of their number in the name of liberty.

Even for the slow-reacting Emperor Francis, there was a danger that the same fate might befall him one day, that Napoleon would seek to replace him with a puppet from the Habsburg royal family or, worse still, one of Napoleon’s own extended family. If Napoleon had merely intimidated the feeble Godoy, or sought his replacement by a tamer Spanish minister, he would have amply secured Spain’s continued subordination. Instead he had sought to overthrow the other most hallowed royal family in Europe as though he was still some rabid Jacobin: he had shown that France’s appetite for conquest was insatiable and that it remained revolutionary at heart, bent on upsetting the natural order of things. Metternich in particular, with his deeply reactionary instincts found this upsetting and was to spend much of his later career seeking to re-entrench absolutism all over Europe.

Napoleon’s invasion of Spain established one thing for Francis: that there could be no peace in Europe while Napoleon ruled. So Francis decided to strike while much of the
Grande Armée
was tied down in Spain. The invasion of Spain and the check to his ambitions there had provided a golden opportunity.

Napoleon’s career as military dictator can now be said to have gone through four phases: as First Consul in 1801–2 he needed military victories to preserve France and his own authority; in 1803–4 when European peace was at last possible, and was briefly achieved; in 1805–7 when his thirst for expansionism prodded the Austrians, Russians and Prussians onto the offensive, although it had ended with his extraordinary triumphs – and which also sowed the seeds for his own downfall when he missed the opportunity to establish a just peace; and now a fourth phase in which a further act of unprovoked aggression provided the opportunity for his continental enemies to attack. The last
real opportunity for a peaceful settlement in Europe was missed between 1805–7, and the point of no return had been reached with the 1808 invasion of Spain. From now on Napoleon’s enemies believed that he must be overthrown for them to survive.

Austria, even after Pressburg, was still a great empire. It had been defeated three times by Napoleon in the field but it had not been conquered or altogether cowed. Austria’s armies had been mauled but they remained large. Austrian possessions had been hacked away in the west, but the empire retained huge possessions, colonies and reserves of men.

Nor, for all his mediocrity was the Emperor Francis either a coward or unintelligent. He, his court and his officers had concluded after Austerlitz that they could not fight on, or go to war again, without profound military reforms to meet the revolutionary new type of warfare pioneered by the
Grande Armée
. And it was to this admirable long-term objective that Austria’s greatest military commander, Archduke Charles, had been turning his attention for four years after the disastrous failure of his commoner rival, General Mack. It was Austria’s great misfortune that Charles could be no more than lieutenant to the dim, uninspiring Francis, or the empire would have had the leadership it required. The final great passage of arms between Napoleon and Charles was now approaching.

Following the defeat at Austerlitz Charles had been made commander-in-chief and had co-authored a new army manual, the
Fundamentals of the High Art of War
, for the generals of the Austrian army. This retained much the same formations, manoeuvres and practices as before. But skirmishers were now to be permitted, drawn from ‘the brightest, most cunning and most reliable’ in the third rank of the traditional three-line formation of the Austrian army. Charles also introduced closed columns of waiting troops to supplement the traditional lines, an idea borrowed from the French which was unpopular with traditional-minded Austrian generals.